CW: child endangerment.
Early Wednesday morning, after a long weekend devoted to the search for her, twelve-year-old Amelia is spotted wandering home on the main highway out of town.
She has at that point been missing since the previous Friday.
In the days to come, everybody who prayed for her, everybody who took to the woods with flashlights and dogs, everybody who comforted her parents and issued wan complaints about the dangers that threaten young children in this troubled world, would normally be exulting and calling her return a miracle.
It does seem to be that, but it is not the kind of miracle that people celebrate, that can be attributed to a compassionate and loving God, that becomes the subject of feel-good stories on the internet. It is a darker thing, just as impossible but not nearly as unambiguous a reward for her loved ones, after a few days of her being only lost.
As far as anyone can tell, she has not been molested, not in the usual sense. Her abductor does not seem to have been a filthy little sex criminal, yanking some local kid into a rape van. There had been fear of that, to be sure, and so the first action taken by police had been to question every known local sex offender, but by the end of the weekend the prospects looked unlikely for the responsible party to be anybody on a list the police know. Now that she’s returned, it is clear that the answer is not that.
It is definitely not that.
• • • •
Amelia has returned carrying her head in a wicker basket.
Her neck is a smooth nub. It does not bleed. There are no other obvious wounds. She moves naturally, like the healthy and athletic girl she’s aways been.
Highway traffic cams will show that she emerged from a small stand of trees on a split between the northern and southern stretches of highway, that she descended into a trash-strewn ditch, then climbed the other side up to the road, just as easily as a girl her age could have been expected to. She hiked the soft shoulder for seven miles, all without attracting the attention of cars that passed her and kept going without noticing what was wrong with her.
Only as the day began to dawn did a highway patrol officer, one Lettie Naismith, pass by in the opposite lane heading north and, heart pounding, do a U-Turn at the next gap in the median. Naismith registered the presence, the apparent health of the figure’s gait, and something wrong about the basket the girl carried, but at first glossed off the void above the shoulders, rejecting the evidence of her own eyes. Her only thought was a prayer that the strange wandering child turn out to be the missing Amelia. She has repented this prayer since. It is terrible that the child is Amelia.
Even as Lettie pulled onto the soft shoulder four car lengths ahead of the girl, her mind still wrote off what she saw as an illusion or a trick. Halloween costumes exist. Some simulate severed heads, either with fakes or with the real head protruding from a dummy torso. Naismith went directly to that explanation. It would have made more sense than what she saw, though it looked more and more unlikely the closer she got.
The video from the body cam shows Naismith’s point of view as she approaches the missing girl. There is a moment during Naismith’s approach when she abruptly stops, still not quite understanding what she sees but knowing, at what must have been a primal level, that it’s wrong. What she sees is of course a headless girl, cradling the bottom of her basket in both arms, even though it has a giant looping handle that she could have shifted from one hand to the other. Naismith will later say that Amelia’s means of holding it feels protective, like she’s carrying a burden she cannot put down. It also brings the basket up to chest-level, making the costume theory easier to swallow. The severed head is bright-eyed, awake, and flashing an unforced, charming smile. It clearly matches the provided images of Amelia. She has bright brown eyes under shiny black bangs, a birthmark in the depicted cheek, and pink lips framing a sliver of teeth that include the chipped incisor that has been listed under Amelia’s distinguishing marks. The head is upright in its basket, rendering its expression natural and easy to read. It is happy to see Naismith. She wears a ridiculously antiquated outfit, a white blouse under powder-blue overalls, comically similar to what the movie Dorothy wore on her journey through Oz.
Then the footage lurches as Naismith sees something—she will never be able to say what—that lets her know the phenomenon is real. The cam picks up a sudden sharp scream from Naismith as she drops to her knees. Amelia’s friendly eyes track her on the way down, interested but not concerned as Naismith retches from the disorienting impact of a universe out of joint. She does not drop the basket or offer to help. She just watches, and then Naismith manages to speak the first words she is capable of voicing: “Lordy! What happened to you?”
Amelia’s head speaks a sentence that turns out to be much of what she will say, over the next few days, as the questions land like hail.
Amelia says, “It’s a very long story.”
• • • •
Naismith transports Amelia to the local emergency room, which at this moment has only two patients. One is off getting a CAT scan and another who has chosen this moment to spend a long interval in the bathroom, indulging an epic case of bad fish. Neither one of them witnesses Amelia’s entrance. By lucky circumstance, only one nurse and one doctor see Amelia as she walks in under her own power. Like Naismith, they also experience the brief misapprehension that what has happened to Amelia is an illusion accomplished by Halloween trickery, though they too discern the truth, part of it, as they draw close. Both doubt their own sanity, which like many in the days to come, will wobble, and in some cases shatter.
There is a short interval while these two recover their professionalism.
One of the doctors, Vijay Agrawal, has a thought he will never share with anyone: the famous true story of a headless rooster later named Mike, who in September of 1945 had his head taken off in what was intended to be a routine slaughter. He recalls how one day later the bird was still walking around, apparently unbothered by its decapitated state, and how it spent the next, and final, eighteen months of its life being exhibited in various carnival sideshows. The explanation happened to be that eighty percent of the bird’s brain mass remained intact in its neck. Despite other farmers cruelly attempting to create their own living headless chicken for display, upon seeing Mike’s owners make a fair living from him, the experiment proved impossible to reproduce; Mike just happened to have been his own medical miracle. Agrawal knows that that the explanation for Mike is wholly unworkable for Amelia, whose brain was—is—almost entirely in the skull. But Mike still lurks in Vijay’s cocktail of associations, and he will tonight have a vivid nightmare, ludicrous on waking, about a girl with an almost-severed chicken head, demanding to know what monster did this to her.
The image will haunt him for the rest of his life, which on this Earth will only last a day or so.
Some idiot informs Amelia’s parents of their daughter being found alive, but does not advise them of her condition. They arrive apprehensive and they are informed that what they are about to see is worse than they can imagine. It is. Amelia’s father vomits without warning, and his hands fly to his face, driven by an immediate and fortunately aborted impulse to claw his eyes out. He runs out and does not come back that day. Amelia’s mother passes out and spends some time insane before she starts demanding answers that the doctors do not, cannot, have. She uses the phrase “my baby” quite a bit. It is genuinely odd that she is the first to find her way back to rationality. She is bipolar, controlled only by strong medication, which she once in a great while falls off in a helpless aversion to the dulled, foggy state that in her mind extinguishes her capacity to feel joy. Her first thought once she internalizes what has happened is that it cannot be real, that at any moment the centered people around her will tell her that her daughter is intact, and that at any moment the people around her will start assuring her that everything is fine. Her first thought once she uses up all denials is that the world is an even more senseless nightmare than she ever imagined, and that all her efforts to remain sane for her daughter were themselves exercises in delusion, hiding from her full understanding of life and the universe. She will not go permanently mad and she will not attempt to kill herself, in the time she has left. But she now dwells in a different place.
Amelia’s head watches with quiet equanimity, as if this sort of carrying-on is what she always sees from her mother. It is unclear how much she understands of her condition, or of anything. She takes in the commotion with quiet fascination, following the arrival of other doctors and of detectives, and the whispered conferences among professionals who know that what they’re seeing is impossible but must come up with a procedure for what sits in front of them.
Amelia just cradles the basket and smiles.
• • • •
Outside the hospital, townspeople gather, knowing that something’s terribly wrong but unable to get anybody to answer exactly what. Among them is sixteen-year-old Natasha Humphreys, who babysat Amelia regularly and has been one of the tireless searchers in the woods, calling Amelia’s name and scanning the likely dumping places with eyes that regularly grew blurry with tears, as she blamed herself for no rational reason, her last time as Amelia’s companion having been over a month earlier. Also in the crowd is one Chester Manton, a forty-seven-year-old bachelor and virgin only twice removed who some of the townspeople called creepy and for the entire weekend had been grimly aware that people like him are always among the scapegoated, even though his greatest eccentricity was his hours poring over a stamp collection. There are sixteen young girls and three young boys Amelia knew, who have taken off school to join the crowd, and who huddle together with declarations of love on posterboard. (In most cases it is true, but at least one of them could not care less and is there to privately exult in the spectacle.) There is a prayer circle, hands clenched, eyes tightly shut, heads facing the overcast sky.
Ashley Hammett, cashier, eighty-five, silently tells God that she has lived long enough and that He should take her if it means the little girl will be okay. She thinks this with the ingrained bitterness of someone who has known outrages other than this and who sees this one, however unspecified, as more of the same. God is a bastard, Ash believes. She has a long list of grievances against the deity, among them the loss of the lively and dependable husband she finally found at fifty-three who she lost to a drunken hit-and-run driver only four years and three months later. To Ash, this was absolute proof of heavenly malice, and the outrages against Amelia, which she has pictured inaccurately but intensely with cinematic verve, are only further illustration of His sadistic capriciousness. Ash is aware that she will later attempt suicide by hanging rather than show up for her late shift at the market.
Adele Everwiner, age fifty-seven, knows Amelia but does not like her. That’s okay. The girl who existed before today didn’t like Adele Everwiner either. Adele is one of those people who despises all manifestations of humanity in her living space: the sounds of playful children, the notes of errant music, bicycles abandoned on nearby lawns, people glancing at her house and then scurrying away lest it result in eye contact. Adele would much prefer that the neighborhood behave like a movie backdrop where she is the only character. Anything else is an imposition. She would never utter the thought out loud, because she knows that people would inflate it to scandal, but she is secretly happy that something has happened to Amelia, because she has observed that the girl has participated in the neighborhood urban legend that Adele Everwiner is a witch, not in mere character but in supernatural fact: a stirrer of cauldrons, a caster of curses. Adele Everwiner is in fact not a witch. She is just an extremely unpleasant person. But there is a part of her who has long wished for something terrible, not permanent but certainly traumatic, to befall the girl, to teach her some manners, since her parents so obviously refuse to. She is not personally aware of this part of her decision-making process. She thinks that she is being a concerned neighbor. But the need is burning in her head as she waits for the bad news to be revealed.
• • • •
Elsewhere, the actual news of Amelia’s condition has spread beyond the hospital, as the doctors working on her consult colleagues at other hospitals, who in a few cases can be persuaded to believe them. That inevitably leads to the intelligence spreading further, and the more distant it travels the less it is believed, the more it feels like some sick urban legend made up by some deluded ass with time on his hands. A few experts are persuaded of the story’s veracity, and among them, a handful get on planes to join the team. They will start arriving in a few hours.
• • • •
The press has already heard, but except for a couple of tabloid newspapers and woo-woo TV sources that just love bizarre stories and do not care whether they deserve credence, most have rejected this one as a certain hoax. That won’t last for long. The news will break worldwide, sooner or later. Right now, and for a little longer, attempts to keep it under wraps enjoy the advantage of disbelief. At least three times during these next couple of hours the truth leaks to the vigil, and the participants, expecting an answer that makes sense, quite sensibly reject it. And that too won’t last.
• • • •
Attempts to remove Amelia’s head from the wicker basket are fruitless. It is not a wicker basket. It is part of Amelia, constructed of cartilage and bone, with vessels that carry blood from her torso to her head. Her windpipe has also been redirected and now travels a different path through the back of her head to her lungs. Her hands do not just cradle the basket. They are connected to it and thus will never relinquish it. Her new Dorothy outfit is also part of her. It is not clothing. It is skin, reconfigured into reasonable approximations of cotton and denim. The one doctor who tries to cut through it to the flesh he expects causes a bleed that makes Amelia moan in protest. It is the only time she loses that expression of unshakeable tranquility. It returns as soon as the doctor stops what he is doing. Scanning her is difficult because of her new unwieldy shape, but after a little adjustment it is managed. The hospital gets a preliminary map of her new skeleton, her new internal geography. She has everything she had before. She has the same minor scars, at least those that can be seen, that are not covered by her new skin. She has the same teeth. There is no question that the head is indeed Amelia’s. But whatever happened to her, wherever she’s been, whoever had hold of her, made her this special and obscene something else. And there the learning stops.
• • • •
“Can you hear me, Amelia?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how you got here?”
“Yes.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No, thank you.”
“Are you thirsty?”
“No, thank you.”
“Do you remember what happened to you?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a very long story.”
“We have time. Can you tell us?”
“No, thank you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a very long story.”
• • • •
Amelia manages to convey charm. There is no reason she should not. She has been a delightful girl her whole life. Hers has been the life of running in backyards, of playing with kittens, of putting together school projects, of whatever middle-grade novel is popular now, of recent experiments with lipstick. She has not sprouted breasts, nor has she endured her first period, but she has quietly felt such developments on the horizon, and extrapolated from the experiences of a couple of early friends that they are something she should expect. She happens to love Wonder Woman, and she suspects that it is not just as a superheroine. She watches over her mom and tolerates the corny jokes of her dad. Someday she wants to pilot planes and she has wondered if she will ever be able to talk her folks into paying for private lessons, or if she’ll have to join the Air Force in order to get the proper training. These are projects for the future. Or, given her current circumstances, they were.
What she feels now, what she thinks now, is hard to know; her equanimity, her secret little smile, suggest changes not just in what she looks like but who she is. More than one observer in these hours will experience the unwanted certainty that the Mona Lisa smile on Amelia’s basketed head reflects an inner understanding of her current predicament, and perhaps of her new place in the world, that she doesn’t mind at all. But whatever she knows cannot be discerned by yes and no questions, the only kind she deigns to answer. Even with constant interrogation there’s no getting at whatever secret she harbors.
• • • •
“Amelia, do you remember winning a special trophy for a class presentation?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what it’s about?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell us about it?”
“No, thank you.”
“Was it about dinosaurs?”
“No, thank you.”
“Was it about the Civil War?”
“No, thank you.”
“Was it about a book?”
“Yes.”
“Was it about The Grapes of Wrath?”
“No.”
“Was it about Harry Potter?”
“No.”
“Was it about Huckleberry Finn?”
“Yes.”
“Is it the best book you ever read?”
“No.”
“Have you already written a report on your favorite?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what that book was?”
“No, thank you.”
“But if I guess it, you will say yes?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me what happened to you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a long story.”
• • • •
Other doctors arrive. They take fresh photos of Amelia. They use many, many words to say very, very little. About the only thing they agree on is that whatever’s happened to Amelia has not been some form of cruel, disfiguring surgery. Not only would no one ever survive such a thing, but even if such a result were possible, there would be signs of the cuts being made, and of the body reeling from the impact of atrocity. The girl they have has not been forced into a new shape. She’s become a girl who looks the way she would look if she’d always looked like this. This means that, already, less than a day into being found, her condition is already being discussed in medical jargon that mostly functions as a means of obfuscating genuinely crackpot explanations. Aliens get discussed early.
Amelia has been given a room at the end of a corridor in a part of the hospital where the patients are mostly old and nonambulatory. A security guard named Jerry Atwater has been posted at the door. He has been instructed to let in Amelia’s medical team and her parents, no one else. He does not volunteer his own opinion, but he has one, and though he does not allow it to be visible, his stomach churns. He privately thinks that whatever came walking down the highway this morning is not Amelia and that she should be driven back to where she was found. He is critically not certain of this and he is as ashamed of this visceral opinion as he’s ever been of anything in his entire life. He is a religious man and a good father, and what he cannot put away is an image of his own six-year-old daughter, Leslie, returned to him looking the way Amelia looks now. He knows that this nightmare contradicts his opinion that the thing in the room is not Amelia. He can bear the dissonance, or at least operate within its boundaries, as he sits in his chair and maintains a quiet frenzy behind an expressionless, professional mask.
Soon, he will be among the first to die.
• • • •
Amelia sits on the edge of the bed. She does not lie down. Her legs, dangling above the cold tile floor, swing back and forth, an idle occupation that offers no insight into her condition or thought processes. If she is lonely, now that her mother has been medicated and sent home, she does not show it. If she thinks that she is now a freak of nature and that the unknown parties responsible have committed an atrocity by making her like this, she does not show it. She is thinking something, that’s for sure; there is every physical indication of an active, waking mind that reacts to stimuli, that thinks and processes, that may even be daydreaming of the life that this phenomenon has destroyed, but that she shows no sign of missing. She has an IV drip and is receiving glucose and fluids, but is not getting anything in the way of pain management because she does not appear to be suffering on any level, not even from the heightened stress that often comes from being in the hospital.
Somebody has kindly put the TV on for her. It is currently tuned to a cable network that specializes in showing ancient sitcoms from the seventies and earlier. It is currently showing one short-lived but improbably beloved offering about an inept sheriff in an old-west town. The episode is about a con man selling a bottled tonic that is supposed to cure all ills but instead makes everybody very drunk. The laugh track is louder than the dialogue. It is clear that Amelia is neither paying attention to the story nor bothered by the noise. The show, which she’s encountered once before, is irrelevant to either of her lives, the new one or the old. If she is even aware that it’s on, she offers no indication. At about midnight a nurse comes in and asks whether she’s sure she doesn’t want to get some sleep. Amelia gives the answer that’s become routine by now, “No, thank you.” The nurse gives her a prescribed sedative through the IV line. Amelia does not object to the new input. Nor does it seem to affect her.
• • • •
Amelia’s mother, who has spent some time being hospitalized in the past few hours, has now been released. Unlike Amelia’s father, who has fled so thoroughly that nobody has the slightest idea where he’s gone, she has regrouped and been cleared to visit her cruelly transformed daughter.
Admitted by Jerry Atwater, she enters on unsteady legs, offers a false smile to the nurse who has been assigned to monitor Amelia, and approaches what she now has for a daughter. Amelia continues to sit on the edge of her bed, kicking her feet. She wears the same absent smile as her mother approaches. Amelia’s mother thinks two things before speaking, one inaccurate, the other maternally perceptive and wholly true. The inaccurate thought is that this thing is not her daughter. It is a reasonable conclusion to come to, but we know it untrue. This absolutely is Amelia and there is no comfort to find in declaring her anything else. The other thought is that the Amelia who disappeared on Friday was a sometimes irritable girl, and that she surely would have said something angry or impatient by now. Amelia’s mother aches for the normality of brattiness.
Getting none of that, aware that this is another manifestation of something wrong, she says, “Hello, honey. Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“It doesn’t hurt?”
“No.”
Amelia’s mother gulps back hysterics. “I promise, baby. Whatever this is, we’ll deal with it. Whatever this is, we’ll make it okay.” The second gulp that follows is half tears, half hysterical laughter at the absurdity of what she just said. “I love you.”
Amelia says, “I love you too, Mom.”
It is the only thing Amelia has said, and because we are alone in knowing what has happened to her, we can testify that the only thing she will say from now on is not some version of yes or no.
Amelia’s mother wants to embrace her but is held back by revulsion she immediately hates herself for feeling. Her hands flutter. Her eyes burn. Paralyzed by the two conflicting emotions of love and horror, she glances at the food on Amelia’s tray and blurts the obvious question from her teeming repertoire of safe maternal responses. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Yes,” Amelia says.
Something opens. It is not Amelia’s mouth, or at least, not the mouth she was born with. It is another seam entirely, cutting along the adorable curve of her chin and beneath it the edge of the wicker basket. The entire thing opens up to reveal a fresh orifice. The black gulf behind it is broader and deeper and darker than Amelia’s mother is willing to believe: It is bottomless, and it leads to no place on this Earth.
The instant before something comes out and seizes the poor woman by the neck, she has another in a series of absurd and strangely accurate thoughts: that she would not be surprised to see dragons circling around down there. She is correct that she will see them, but she will by then be too close to her extinction to exhibit surprise. All she knows at this moment is a yank, a sense of being jerked from the world she knows into one where sweet little girls like Amelia were are made into things like whatever Amelia is now. As she falls, she grasps for the portal back to her daughter’s hospital room and beyond it the place of scrubbed floors and fluorescent overheads, before the opening recedes with distance and then blinks out.
The monitoring nurse has leaped to her feet, too late to do anything, not that there was anything she could have done had she reacted faster. She has not screamed, not the ear-piercing scream of the horror movie default, but she has yelped; and she has felt her own belly lurch from a vertigo that has arrived and that will not have time to go away. Given another five seconds, she would scream, or run, or lose her mind, but we know that she has no time for any of these things.
Instead, she cries, “Jesus! What did they do to you?”
It’s worth noting that she has not said “What’s happened to you?” That question would take no position on there being a culprit of some kind, human or otherwise, who took the Amelia that was and transformed her, deliberately, through means unguessed at, and with motive we cannot recreate, into the Amelia that is. Instead, she has asked, “What did they do to you?” a formulation that is accidentally fully accurate in its affirmation that this was a deliberate act, committed by they. It is alas not only all she gets to know, but all that there ever will be to know.
Jesus! What have they done to you?
Amelia hops off the bed, lands on her feet, steps toward her, that big impossible mouth opening once again.
She says, “That’s a long story.”
